Andersonville (31 page)

The slate eyes of Brigadier General John H. Winder had seen much horror in their time. They had overseen the killing of Seminoles and the shelling of Mexican soldiers, and now they looked on the rows of languishing Union prisoners in the Florence stockade, hugging themselves in the snow, so like the wasted men he had left behind in Andersonville.

A grim smile passed over his lined face.

Lieutenant Colonel Forno, the officer who trudged alongside him through the gates of Florence and the South Carolina cold, frowned in consternation at that hint of a smile and wondered what could have drifted through the old man's mind to induce mirth in the face of such abominable suffering. There was nothing to smile about. The prisoners here at Florence were dying at the rate of two hundred a day, Sherman was threatening Columbia, and the Confederacy was breathing its last.

But Forno could not know that the presence behind those eyes was not that of the superintendent of prisons, come to organize the removal of prisoners in this enemy-threatened position to another stockade in southwestern Georgia. He couldn't know that the three officers charged with excessive cruelty and awaiting the general's sentence in the stockade command were actually about to be recruited into the scheme of an ageless being who had set himself up as the enemy of all humanity.

The killing Winder had seen was nothing compared with the visions the spirit that looked out of the old man's eyes had witnessed. Long ago the young angel Mastemah had seen firsthand the birth of warfare on a cosmic, extraplanar scale. At the dawn of man he had grown derelict in his duty as a watcher over mankind and had sought to manifest himself and practice the physical pleasures reserved for humans on their women and on their men alike, spawning unholy offspring with the former, whose presence on earth necessitated the eradication of all life for a time, until the world could be sown again under a new covenant. For the punishment that had come as a result of his own sin, he had grown to hate man.

Now, in the suffering of these prisoners, he saw an opportunity to finish what he had recently failed to do in Andersonville. Months had passed since he had been cast out from his chosen host, Wirz, by those two sorcerous meddlers. They owed their victory more to luck than to skill. In the interim since his departure, Mastemah had hunted down this old man. He had not been a willing host, but he was a weak-willed swindler with a sick heart, fearful of death and easily cajoled and corrupted. His jaw finally had healed, and he could speak again. He could begin anew, and in his role as the master of all prisons this side of the Mississippi, he could compound the suffering he had enacted in Andersonville to even greater heights.

The ha-Mashchit would rise, and when it had devoured the men of earth, he would ascend again to the warm presence of his Holy Father.

The form of Winder was not as hearty as Wirz's had been. Even in the end, when Lourdes had cursed him, he had been a healthier specimen. This sixty-five-year-old body was racked with old pains that were sharpened by the winter cold, and he moved abominably slowly.

That would change in time. He was already rejuvenating this body, making it a more suitable vehicle.

He bore no particular ill will toward Lourdes and Lieutenant Day. They had successfully blunted his purpose for the time being, but they were no more than an annoyance. He had all of time to exact his revenge, and he didn't mind if time itself act on his behalf in that regard.

He smiled with self-satisfaction at that thought. They would die by the ha-Mashchit or fade to dust. He would win in the end either way.

A shadow fell across the morning sun, and he glanced up at the white sky, expecting some lost seabird or a meandering cloud.

What he saw bearing down on him like an eagle caused him to shrink into the back of Winder's mind, for an instant relinquishing his iron control of the old general.

In that moment, both of them saw that terrible sight and were of one mind, so that even Winder understood what it was.

Winder stood beside Mastemah on the mountain overlooking the metropolises of Sodom and Gomorrah. Together they watched Lot's wife glance back at the rampant cataclysm that engulfed her home, a sight so tremendous and terrible that it burned her away to salt that the hot wind that was the outermost breath of the Destroyer blew away in a single gust.

They saw the same awful shape wending through the streets of Pithom and Heliopolis, stealing the life from the firstborn, even into the House of Ramses, where the son of the pharaoh died screaming in his silken sheets.

They cowered together on the top of the temple mound when the sun worshipers stormed the platform with their clubs and knives of flint and the Destroyer was quelled in their own blood.

And they shared their ultimate death when the ha-Mashchit swooped down roaring upon them like a roiling, winged darkness, simultaneously taloned and fanged, furred and feathered, scaled and slithering, and emanating white ice and purple flame. It engulfed them in a fire hotter than any that burned in hell, a shattering inferno that consumed them utterly, immolating them in a flash.

For an eternity they knew pain and the disembodied senselessness of a polar lightless pit. They could not scream as they had no mouths. They could not end their torment without hands. They knew the unendurable suffering of the ha-Mashchit's victims and realized that even an angel could die. When at last their minds broke asunder, they simply ceased to be and were stricken from even the memory of God.

As Lieutenant Colonel Forno watched, Brigadier General John Winder's smile fell.

He gripped his chest, gasped, and fell face-first into the mud and snow.

The war had ended four months earlier.

From Savannah, Barclay had parted ways with Father Whelan and made his way to Richmond, to the only address he knew there, 811 North 5th. There he had finally met his contact Quaker, a man named Thomas McNiven, a prominent baker and a coordinator for all the Union spies in the area. He had stayed there to recuperate from his wounds and fill out his clothes, working in the bakeshop, regaining his weight. He had assisted the local intelligence until January, when he had been called upon to effect the escape of their top operative, Mary Bowser, a bold black woman posing as an ignorant slave in Jefferson Davis's own house. She made their departure all the more expeditious by setting fire to the Confederate White House when he came to collect her.

He had returned to John Scobell in Washington, D.C., presented a full report to his incredulous superiors, and been summarily dismissed from service by Baker for leaving the fate of the war in the hands of a Confederate intelligence agent.

Yet in February he had been called into Baker's office and informed that General John Winder had died of a heart attack in Florence, South Carolina.

He was ushered into a heavily guarded side chamber then, where three people offered their sincere thanks. Two of them were the first lady and Miss Hattie Maynard, who went so far as to embrace him and weep into his shoulder, thanking him for ending her nightmares.

The third was President Lincoln.

“I confess I am a tad befuddled by all this,” said the president, extending his bony hand. “The intelligence service tells me very little, and my wife even less. Nevertheless, I understand I owe you a very great debt, Captain Lourdes.”

Barclay winced at his grip. His hands still ached sometimes in the winter.

“Thank you, Mr. President,” said Barclay. “But I'm only a lieutenant, and that in the Confederate Army.”

The cadaverous man leaned in, and a thin smile played over his graying beard as he touched his finger to the side of his nose.

“It seems we are both of us kept in the dark some.”

After his audience, Baker informed Barclay that he had been promoted and reinstated into service.

He refused both honors and spent the next two months as a French language tutor.

In the spring, he joined the crowds in front of the White House to hear the president speak on the surrender of General Lee and the readmission of Louisiana into the Union.

Lincoln said: “Some twelve thousand voters in the heretofore slave-state of Louisiana have sworn allegiance to the Union, held elections, adopted a free-state constitution, giving the benefit of public schools equally to black and white, and empowering the Legislature to confer the elective franchise upon the colored man. Their Legislature has already voted to ratify the constitutional amendment recently passed by Congress, abolishing slavery throughout the nation. These twelve thousand persons ask the nation's recognition and its assistance to make good their committal. Now, if we reject them, we do our utmost to disorganize and disperse them. We in effect say to the white men ‘You are worthless—we will neither help you, nor be helped by you.' To the blacks we say ‘This cup of liberty which these, your old masters, hold to your lips, we will dash from you, and leave you to the chances of gathering the spilled and scattered contents in some vague and undefined when, where, and how.' If this course has any tendency to bring Louisiana into proper practical relations with the Union, I have, so far, been unable to perceive it.”

A well-dressed white man in the crowd next to Barclay clenched his left fist to his breast a little overdramatically and muttered, “That is the last speech
he
will make.”

He shoved his way angrily through the crowd.

Barclay remembered seeing a trio of letters tattooed on the back of the man's left hand:
J.W.B.

Three days later Barclay saw the man's portrait in the newspaper. He had made good on his word. John Wilkes Booth had shot and killed the president.

Two weeks later he saw another familiar face in his morning paper.

Booth was dead. He had been shot through the neck in the barn of a tobacco farm in Virginia by a Union soldier, who was pictured. Though he was clean-shaven, Barclay did not need to read the caption to know it was the Hatter of Andersonville, Boston Corbett.

Booth's diary, taken from his corpse, contained a passage regarding his killing of Lincoln: “Our country owed all her troubles to him, and God simply made me the instrument of his punishment.”

But Barclay knew well which man God had chosen as His instrument that day.

The gibbet that rose from the yard of the Old Capitol Prison held but one noose and was much refined compared with the rude structure that had sprouted from the bloody ground of Andersonville. The yard itself was crowded with Union men in full uniform, the points of their spike bayonets a restless, glittering thicket of steel.

Over the yard wall, the streets were packed with onlookers who had been unable to secure a ticket to the event. The roofs of the adjoining buildings were dotted with blue uniforms. The Capitol stood in silent, ominous judgment over all.

Barclay stood on the roof of a tobacco shop, looking into the yard through a pair of field glasses. Wirz's trial had been a heated affair in which the Swiss major (he apparently had been promoted at some point before his capture) seemed bewildered by the heinous charges of abuse leveled against him. Some were already calling the trial a sham and Wirz a scapegoat. He really didn't remember much of it, Barclay realized. Which of his deeds had been under the direction of Mastemah couldn't be known. He thought of the earlier man Wirz had shot at the depot the day he'd arrived.

A few days ago Wirz's wife had visited him in prison and apparently tried to poison him with strychnine.

Wirz sat on a stool on the scaffold for twenty minutes as the various charges against him were read.

At a few minutes before ten-thirty the stool was taken away, his arms were pinioned, and the noose was fitted. A drumroll played, and Barclay watched the executioner kick the trap spring.

A boisterous, incongruous cheer went up from the throats of the soldiers as Wirz dropped through the platform, and those outside the walls understood and took up the cheer.

To Barclay it sounded like the cries on the battlefield. For untold minutes as Wirz hung there, strangling and twisting, Barclay dwelled on the fact that this ribald cheering was the last sound the man was currently hearing. When the celebration died down enough for the surgeon to declare Wirz dead, the men rushed forward and began to pull the gallows to pieces for souvenirs.

In the street below, Barclay stomped through the rejoicing crowd with his fists in his pockets, ruminating silently until he heard his name called.

Looking up, he was stricken by the sight of Callixtus, the lazy-eyed young soldier who had been his neighbor at Andersonville. He was in his Union uniform.

The two of them embraced and laughed, and Barclay felt how thin the boy was.

“I thought you was dead, Barclay! We all seen you lyin' at the South Gate. Hell, you was carried out and buried, I thought!”

Barclay shrugged.

“I faked it,” he said. “Got away.”

Callixtus shook his head, his eyes swelling with tears.

“I'll be. You the best faker I ever seen, or else it was just one more miracle happened the night of that storm.”

“Miracle?”

“You remember those thirsty days after the Flying Dutchman discovered that tunnel and filled in all the wells, and then Father Whelan, the old angel of Andersonville, brought us bread and prayed with us? That was the night God answered with rain.”

“The rain,” Barclay said. “Yes, I remember the rain.”

“Lightning struck inside the stockade, and then there come a spring opened up of clean, cool water. The boys called it Providence Spring.”

Barclay remembered the recurring dream Clemis had told him about just such a spring, which had water from the master's well.

“Callixtus, do you remember a soldier, a white soldier, named Charlie Trevors?”

Callixtus looked sideways at Barclay and grinned.

“You mean the woman?”

“You knew?” Barclay asked, surprised.

“It come out.”

“How? What happened to her?”

“Well, you remember the Hatter, that crazy preaching fellow with the wound, used to wade in the creek?”

Apparently Callixtus had never learned Corbett's real name or just didn't know what he'd gone on to do.

“Yes.”

“And of course you remember that Indian Doctor John that was in my tent in the end? I believe he said he tended to you once or twice.”

“I remember him, yes.”

“Well, the Hatter brought her to our tent and told Doctor John she was in a bad way and had to be looked after. He pulled two bullets from her, and you couldn't help but notice she was a woman. I don't know how she come by them. Maybe she got too close to the deadline. She stayed with us for a time after that, in a poor way. Then one night Doctor John woke up from a dream and told me she was goin' have a baby, but they was somethin' the matter with it, and they was somethin' he had to do. In the morning he had one of the grave diggers fetch him some dirt from off of one of the Raiders' graves.”

Barclay stared, the back of his neck tingling, but said nothing.

“Then he had her drink some water from Providence Spring, and he wet that grave dirt and rubbed it over her belly till I swear the dirt disappeared. Praise God if she didn't come around all right shortly after that.”

The dirt off a Raider's grave. Surely that had been the grave of Jack Muir, the only innocent man to have been hanged that day. An innocent man's ghost was restless and could not pass on easily. And the baby in Charlie's belly had been without a soul.

Barclay recognized the portent of the spell Doctor John had performed. He had united the lost soul with an unborn body. Muir would be born again in Charlie's infant. No malicious entity would find a home in that empty child.

But how had Doctor John come by that knowledge?

The
lwa
must have come to him. Surely it had been Erzulie, whose concern was ever the unborn.

And Doctor John had learned nothing if not to follow the wisdom of dreams.

“Then what became of her?”

“On the day we was paroled, well, she had that baby. All of us knew about it by then, but we was still afraid of Wirz, and we kept her secret, gave her extra rations, paid close attention to her. 'Course, when our own men come to get us, it didn't need to be a secret no more. Her boy was the last miracle of Andersonville.”

Barclay smiled. He wondered where that mother and child had ended up.

“And what about Doctor John?”

Callixtus's smile failed.

“Well, he was paroled before me, round about the twentieth of March,” said Callixtus. “He was with the ones that was took to Vicksburg and boarded a steamer, the
Sultana
, bound for Cairo, Illinois. We got word later the boiler blew outside Memphis. Most of the men on board burned or sank. I expect he was among that number.”

Barclay was quiet a long time then. He listened to Callixtus talk about other men he had known and a good many he had not.

When they said their good-byes, Callixtus asked him where he was bound.

“It's time for me to go home,” Barclay said.

If there was anything left of home to return to.